Remulla favors Sangley over Kawit-Las Pinas as new airport site

Cavite Gov. Jonvic Remulla said he preferred Sangley Point over the reported plan of San Miguel and Philippine Airlines president Ramon S. Ang to reclaim at least 2,000 hectares of land within the Las Pinas-Bacoor-Kawit foreshore corridor as site for a new terminal to replace the overcrowded Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

“Please include my strong endorsement for the Sangley Point redevelopment into the new international airport,” Remulla said in a brief statement, when asked about the reported new application for reclamation filed before the Kawit municipal government.

The Kawit application, according to the grapevine, is a fallback plan for reclamation proponent Peter Sunchianco, president of Cyber Bay Corp., a listed real estate company chaired by Ang, in the wake of the vigorous opposition mounted from the Las Pinas side by former representative and now senatorial candidate Cynthia Villar, a Remulla ally.

The governor said he was unaware of any overtures allegedly coming from the Ang camp to acquire the Remullas’ Island Cove resort, also in Kawit, should the municipal council finally give its go-ahead to the ambitious reclamation project.

Villar lawyer Frank Chavez, meanwhile, clarified that it was only Villar’s left-wing NGO allies, not including the former congresswoman as earlier reported, whose motion to intervene had been rejected by the Court of Appeals.

To date, Villar, a hydrologist, an environmental lawyer and an environmental scientist had finished testifying before the Court of Appeals about the feared worsened flooding within the Villar congressional district should the reclamation push through.

Even with the reclamation proposal going through the regulatory mill, the San Miguel/PAL president still seems to be hedging his bets on the new airport location, if the Puerto Azul resort in Cavite is to be believed.

As early as August, Mauro Badiola, vice president for finance of Boulevard Holdings, the developer of Puerto Azul, reported that “one of the country’s premier conglomerates” had already acquired and aggregated 4,000 hectares from the neighboring towns of Naic, Maragondon, Indang and Cavite.

The unidentified conglomerate’s plan? To establish a 10,000-hectare corridor from the coastline of Ternate towards the Indang hinterlands, “in order to create a duty-free seaport, residential and industrial districts, and an airport.”

“We think this is in line with many urban planners’ calls — such as from our architects, Palafox Associates — that Metro Manila, like many large megacities, requires three airports,” Badiola said.

The conglomerate’s aggressive accumulation, headed by buying agent “Prudente” in Naic, has already pushed land prices in the area from P150 a square meter to reportedly P350, and even up to P500/sqm.

Last week, Badiola’s boss, chairman and president Jose Marcel Panlilio, could not help himself and finally identified the conglomerate as the San Miguel Corp.

Panlilio even included in his report to the shareholders a map showing the location of the planned “San Miguel Airport City” right next to his Puerto Azul resort.

The same-day denial issued by San Miguel was cleverly worded; it did not deny that it had been accumulating lands within the Naic-Ternate corridor, only that “it has no transactions with (Boulevard Holdings and) neither does the company have an airport project as indicated in the location map.”